Tags: learning Portuguese

One of the things that all expats have to deal with when they begin to learn Portuguese in Portugal is getting over the fear of speaking. Portuguese is particularly alien to the native English, because of the accent and the speed at which Portuguese people talk. Here are a few tips to help you get over your…

(Lou) Last week was definitely an interesting one. Both Ben and I have work stacked up in front of us, which is great as we save up for the (ever closer) impending arrival of our little bundle of joy later this year. The alternately cloudy, sunny and blustery weather has suited our indoor lifestyle, which…

It seems hard to believe that we are approaching the four year anniversary of our move to Portugal. I can still clearly remember driving to and from work in the weeks before our move, endlessly repeating phrases from my Portuguese language learning CD as I sat in traffic on the A3. Our language skills have…

Life in Portugal can be tricky enough when you’re trying to negotiate the endless paperwork or identify strange looking cuts of meat in the butcher’s, let alone when you try and work out how to speak Portuguese. The difficulty with learning Portuguese is that what you say and hear doesn’t seem to correspond much with…

We don’t really know how to speak Portuguese properly yet, even though we have been here over two years. Sure, we cope day-to-day and have even managed to read some novels in Portuguese, but our ability to speak and comprehend plateaued after the first year and our progress stalled. Many people say that you can…

Last Saturday, I asked my wife if we had any butter left in the fridge. Her reply was, “we only have butter without salt.” Now, I’m sure you’re wondering where on earth I’m going with this post, so let me explain. If we still lived in England, her answer would have been, “we only have…

To conclude my retrospective look at our first exciting year in Portugal, here, as promised in my last posts are our high points and respective low points of our first year in the Algarve. THE HIGHS 1. Sharing our new home with friends and family – some of our happiest times here to date have…

It is now just over a year since we waved goodbye to Old London Town, and got on the plane to Portugal, leaving our old life behind. Needless to say, the year has been one of the most eventful of our lives, and I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to work out how to summarise our…

We had a bit of an unsettled week here in Portugal last week, followed by a very enjoyable weekend. As any long term readers of the blog will know, every now and then we get “wobbly days” with regard to being here – something that most expats we speak to can relate to. We had…

I had very much hoped to call this next post “Chilling Like a Resident.” Unfortunately, despite a tour of four different government offices yesterday, it was not to be – we still don’t have our residency. The two major problems here, as I see them, are firstly that European law changes all the time and…